The invention relates to a cleaning tool, especially for dental use, with a rotary shaft, at the free end of which a detachable cleaning body of an elastically yielding material can be mounted, said body at the end being hollowed to form a cup-like concavity extending inwardes from the rim, and where ribs extend inwards from the rim in the cup.
Tools of this sort are applied for dental use for cleaning and polishing tooth faces, where the scraping and polishing body when used by dentists is secured to the driving shaft in the angle piece. In use a paste-like or liquid abrasive, polishing agent or disinfectant is applied, which by means of the rotary body is brought to act on the tooth face.
Moreover, such a body can be mounted on other types of rotary shafts, such as electric toothbrushes with rotary brushes, where the user can operate the tool himself.
In this way the tooth faces can be cleaned effectively for plaque and other impurities.
However, this cleaning and the usual daily brushing of teeth and gum has no prophylactic effect on the serious tooth disease, paradentosis. With this disease teeth may loosen because the jawbone and the surrounding tissue are slowly decomposed. The disease gives hardly any sypmtoms and will therefore often be at a very advanced state before it is detected.
The disease is caused by enzymes and other bacteriological products given off by such bacteria as are always present in any mouth. Paradentosis develops in the small open gingival pockets around the teeth, where it is not possible to remove those coatings on the teeth, on which the bacteria thrive. If the bacteria are left to accumulate, inflammation of the surrounding gum will occur. The inflammation will spread, and the enzymes will attack the fibres of the periodontal connecting the bone with the tooth. When these fibres are decomposed, the bone will retract itself, and the tooth will be left with still less to be rooted in, so that eventually it becomes loose and may fall out.
Paradentosis is treated by removing the bacteria accumulations and making sure they do not reform.
If the accumulations are deep down in a gingival pocket, it can be difficult to get access to it, and surgery will often be necessary to remove inflamed gum in order to get access to the pocket and stop the attack.
The problem is that even daily careful toothbrushing offers no protection against paradentosis since as previously mentioned, it is practically impossible to clean the gingival pockets properly.